Make your own PBR textures for free! | Beginner tutorial | CC0Textures

over the last couple of weeks I have started uploading free PBR textures on my website CC 0 textures calm and pretty much ever since I started I have received one question how do you actually make these what does it take to create a PBR texture to answer your questions I have made this little walkthrough on how you can create your very first PBR material from scratch so what do you need for that process now since this tutorial is aimed at beginners you will not need any fancy and expensive material creation software will work with two free tools Microsoft is a panorama stitching software and with a special normal mapping plugin which I will show you how to install later on you will also need a decent camera preferably with a tripod you can use your phone if you really want to in that case make at least sure that you disable as many of the automatic image Corrections and filters as possible if you have a DSLR or something similar at hand make sure that you are shooting in the highest quality preferably raw and set it to a very low ISO value but another aspect that might be even more important at least if you are shooting outdoors are the weather and lighting conditions generally you should try to get very flat and uniform lighting so avoid shooting in bright sunlight rain can also be a problem not only does it make the entire surface a lot more reflective than it usually is it can also leave some very annoying dark spots long after the downfall itself has stopped so look out for that if you are planning on making your very first texture I would suggest starting with some tiles or paving stones since editing them is a lot easier than say ground textures so set up your camera and start taking several pictures move your camera along in a grid of maybe three by three or four by four and make sure that you have some overlap between the images so that it is actually possible to piece them together later on once you're done copy the files to your computer [Music] okay time to start editing I've got my RAW images here so I'm just going to open that folder like this and if you just select all of them and right-click you'll get this option stitch images using image composite at the top if you don't get that option just open the editor the regular way and just drag and drop all those images in there okay now we are in Microsoft eyes in here we actually don't need to do a lot just select planar motion because we just moved along the surface on just one planar motion as it says then just continue onwards to step two stitch now it's going to stitch life images yeah that's going to take a while but we don't have that many images so it's relatively quickly you can see and you can now check if everything looks okay yeah I'm quite happy with this result so just move on to crop now I'm not actually going to crop that image I'm going to do that lighter in so just ignore this step and move onwards to export now here when you export it's very important that you choose a lossless file format so by default it's set to jpg image with equality of 75 which is very low in my opinion so just change that to something like tiff if you want to then just click on export to disk and select the folder you want to export this into I'm just going to call that wall tiles safe and we're done you can now close Microsoft I see you you can save your project if you want to I'm maybe I'm just going to quickly do that but we shouldn't need it so you can also just delete it okay now if we go into our folder we have this really huge 70 megabyte image of our texture and we can now start processing that in game now before we do this if this is the first time that you are trying to create textures using you'll need to install the normal map plugin I've put the link in the description this will take you to the download page so you can get it for Windows 64 or Windows 32 it will give you this zip file which I've unpacked here so this zip file will just contain the normal map dot exe file and three dll files and included in this also a week me that tells you how to install this I'm just going to roughly show that so basically you're just going to extract the normal map Exe and put that into this folder and you're going to take the three dll files and put them in this folder so for me this means that I just have to go to my installation folder which looks like this I've installed this on a different Drive that's right the path is different and then just navigate to where it tells you to go so for me that would be to which I'm in currently lip 2.0 and then plugins and here I would import my normal map dot exe so this one I'm not going to do this because I obviously already have it installed so you would just copy that and then you'd go to 2 back to your installation folder into the bin folder and there you would just paste in details you can see there are already quite a few deals in there by default so you'll just have to add those there and then you can use to generate normal maps which is going to be important later on so I'm just going to quickly close that and now we can actually open up on this screen maybe ok now it's time to open up your image so just grab it and drop it into you it is and that's the image we just created now the first step in here is to just use the rectangle select tool and Mark out the area that you want to tile roughly it doesn't need to be perfect so for me that's this 5x5 grid yeah so I'm just going to roughly mask that out I'm going to leave a bit of space around it like so and now we'll adjust the image to exactly fit this canvas to do that go to image guides and first of all create new guides from selection if you click this you'll see that it creates these blue helping lines that are going to be very useful in the next step now make sure that your entire image is selected so just go over it with the select tool once and then you use the perspective tool just click on it and it will give you those four points that you can use to control the image or to move it like that and it will also give you this little floating window so go to any edge of your image and use this control handle to move it into position so for me this means M and the seams between the tiles to exactly line up with my blue guidelines so that I'm to zoom out a little bit and I'll just go like that and basically I'll just repeat that for all four edges so like this this and in the top right like so now this seems to be it but if we go back to the bottom bottom right corner where we started and you'll see that it actually shifted a little bit because we moved all the other edges and that's how the perspective tool works now there is also this what they call this cage transform tool in game that should technically make this process easier but at least in my opinion it's very slow very glitchy and it takes forever to calculate so that's why I'm using the perspective tool now sadly this means that we all have to readjust our edges a little bit so just make you round around the image for a second time and just move them in in position okay and this one so now if we look all four edges should be aligned to our blue grid and maybe movie in range that a little bit over here and over here all right so now zoom out this is what it's going to look like and click transform in your little floaty window this might take a while depending on your computer just wait even if it says that it's not responding don't worry it is working okay now we have our new perfectly aligned image as a floating selection we want to turn that into an actual layer so just right-click on it and select two new layer now it also left us with this empty white layer just delete that we don't need it now we have our transformation layer which looks like that and you can see our layer is now actually bigger than our image because we rearranged it and we don't want that so we'll have to adjust the canvas that uses and fortunately there's very easy way to do that just go to image and then say fit canvas two layers and you'll see it it will just make the image a little bit bigger so it actually can contain this transformation there okay now we can actually start on making it seamless so go back to your rectangle select tool and select one of the sides I'm going to use the right side like this you could also use this area if you want to it doesn't really matter it's just personal preference I'm just going to use this one like so then just hit control C and immediately paste it with control V so we have a new floating selection which again will have to turn into a new layer so if you've done that correctly you should now have your main transformation layer which just is the image that we started with or the adjusted image and then you should also have this new pasted layer which is just this part we enable both of them make both of them visible again now select your pass that layer use the Move tool and then just grab it while doing so hold down the control key so it will actually only move that in one direction you can see I can move my cursor but it won't jiggle around with the image so just move it and put that to the right side of your left guideline like this so if you now zoom in you'll see that we've actually copied this part of the image onto here and now since this part is by nature seamless to this one because it's part of the same image this part is also going to be seamless to this pallet and therefore we now have an image that is seamless on the x-axis but obviously we've cheated a little bit basically we've just moved this theme it's now over here and it looks absolutely horrendous so we'll need to fix that through that first of all we need to get rid of this yellow line because it makes it really hard to see the transition so just go to your paste that layer right click on it and say layer to image size and basically that will just extend the layer to the whole canvas and we no longer have this annoying edge that we don't really need then go to your paste layer again and add in a layer mask for this purpose I'm going to use a white one with with full opacity like this now right-click on it and make sure that it's set to edit layer mask because now what we can actually do is we can take a brush and use a dark color to hide this pasted layer or a light color to make it visible again so now just zoom in and if we try that out very quickly and go to increase the scale here you can see that you can just paint over this and we now have a transition between the two images that is pretty seamless I would say so just go through that now if that's a bit too tedious for your for your taste you can also use a gradient tool so just use that and move in again you can hold down the control key to make it snap to different directions so that it actually creates a perfectly horizontal gradient and then just let go of it and you'll see that we have this perfect gradient in the transition between the two is pretty smooth actually yeah you can see it now few problems over here but those are really small not big enough to be really noticeable and yeah we now have an image or let's say an area of an image that is seamless on the x-axis so we could now technically copy this in a square and just paste it next to this one and there would be no seam over here so now we just need to repeat that for the other part of the image for the y-axis so again grab your rectangle tool select the bottom area like like so press control C and then just ctrl V to copy and paste it turn the floating selection into a new layer and then use the Move tool to move it upwards while holding ctrl that it so that it stays aligned to the image again the image is now technically seamless because we don't have the seam over here but we obviously have this huge seam over here so right click on your new layer and say layer to image size so we've gotten rid of this yellow line and then again add in a layer mask a white one all right now zoom in a little bit and just get out the brush all your gradient I'm just going to use the gradient and remove all the parts of the image that you don't want now in general what you want is a pretty long transition because that's less obvious like so thank you can now see if we zoom in if we have a pretty good transition now it's as you can see here these tiles happen to be a bit lighter than the ones on the bottom so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to grab a brush and I'm just going to set that to a dark color and a pretty large size like 700 maybe and I'm also going to make that pretty smooth with a maybe with a slightly lower opacity of like 40 and then I'm just going to remove a bit of that darkness down here because that's honestly more than what we need here so just I'm probably going to make it a bit more subtle just really start a really subtle effect basically it's there to just hide this transition because if you look you can clearly see that all the tiles start out very light and then gradually become darkened by just by adding in a few a few random spots we can actually make that we can actually hide that a little bit so that's not necessary you can just experiment and find out what works best for you for your scene for your texture in this part we'll just you really just have to try out different styles but obviously don't delete any of the pixels right near the edge because those other ones that are responsible for actually making it tile so keep that in mind and again one really beautiful thing here since we're using a mask layer let me just show you that we're using a mask layer you can actually I'm just hi bad so um you can actually use a right brush and if you now notice oh maybe that transition has gotten a little bit too too extreme the the gradient is very shot you can just take a brush and add in a bit of that other image again so that's really convenient I'm not going to continue on with this for much longer because this is just for the purpose of our tutorial if you wanted to make a real texture with this we probably spend a bit more time here and making sure that this theme looks decent but that's again just something that you can play around with as you go just tile it or open it into your scene and into the scene that you want to use it in and then just see if it works and if it doesn't just go back and tweak the colors a little bit alright I'm just going to leave it like that for now and again I'm going to right click on my layer and I'm going to match that down onto our main layer so congratulations we now have a seamless image we just need to get rid of those paths around it so again time for the rectangle tool just make a rough selection and then grab the edges like this and move them to the guides until they snap yeah and then just click image and image crop to selection and boom that's your texture right there we can now move on to the maps alright so how do we create maps from our image for a PBR material or for the sort of PBMs Yule material that we are going to create will need a displacement a normal and a roughness map so first of all so that we can quit keep track of what we're doing just rename this layer that you already have to color that so that you know what it is and then make a duplicate now if we go to colors you'll find the option desaturate if you do that you'll basically just get a black and white version of your image and if you look at it at first that might seem to be really good you know the the the seems of somewhat darker the tiles are somewhat lighter but if you actually open that in a 3d software you'll see that this is not a very good displacement map what we need em is a better distinction between those tiles all those seams and the actual tiles so how can we achieve that that's actually quite easy hide this layer don't need to hide it but this makes it easier to see what we're doing go back to your original color layer and then go to colors components decompose now here we have the option to basically split up the image into its individual channels now what here you can see it's set to RGB red green and blue but that's actually not what we are going to use we're going to switch this to hue saturation and value which you might know if you use blender a lot other 3d or video editing software it's not super common but what it basically means aged hue stands for the color and saturation basically how intensely colors how saturated this and value that's basically whether it is very light or very dark but you'll see the effect of this in just a second you can keep this check back on decompose to last just click OK let it chew through this and we get this which is of course beautiful we also get set you the situation map which is maybe useful way a little but not for our purposes and we get the value map which is basically just a black and white copy of this image but again the part that's interesting for us is the hue map because as you can see while those might have very different values some of some of those parts here a very very dark dark some of those parts here in the seem a very light the hue is fundamentally different because this is all somewhat reddish brown and this is all somewhat bluish it's obviously not very saturated so it's hard to tell but it's probably bluish or maybe greenish and therefore we get this beautiful separation from the tiles and um the seams between them so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select select this entire layer press ctrl C then move back to the original image because the decomposing thing created a new one so just move back to the original and paste that and again it pasted it as a floating selection so just add that as a new layer now if we zoom enough in now now a new beautiful tile map you could call it you'll see that it it's actually not that perfect because there are a few like what would you call them glitches or a few white dots in here in general this is extremely bland there's not a lot of a lot going on with the displacement on in here you'll see there are a lots of artifacts so that's not really not very detailed but we have a detailed map it's the black and white copy of our color layer you can see that still has all of its beautiful details so we'll basically need to combine them how do we do that first of all go back to your paste layer to your your black and white map please of the details and will now need to apply several filters to them we'll start with just a blur that's because we have the sharp lines in our color copy no black and white color map but we then meet the new the map as I will call them to create these large-scale displacement between the seams so this is basically the fine detail and this is the large scale but as you can see a it's much too sharp this would be a very extreme drop-off and it's a bit too noisy like that and it's inverted so we'll need to apply two filters filter number one colours invert that's simple it will just invert all of the colours and we now have a proper displacement because obviously the seams need to be darker then details themselves the second one is a blur a Gaussian blur you can experiment with the strength of this um for the tutorial I think I'll use in the prep during the preparation I used something like 20 24 25 so just let it chew through this and now you can see we have our blood large-scale displacements and our very fine displacements okay we are almost done because there's one thing I would like to fix as you can see this this theme is not really black and therefore if we were to use it as a displacement map you wouldn't actually use the full color spectrum that's available so to fix that just go to the colors curves and just move that along until all of the paths actually dark but make sure that you don't overdo it because then you'd clip some textures here so if I were to do this real extreme yeah like so you see that we will turn all of this in just one solid black color and that's not what you want you want a smooth gradient it's just a little bit darker than what we currently have yeah like so maybe so just to confirm that and now we basically only need to combine the two and for that I'm going to use the easiest process imaginable I'm just going to go to my paste layer and decrease the opacity and now you can see we have a combination of the details which are now really subtle they don't take a lot of effect because we have our pasted layer on top of them with an opacity of like 70 percent but they are still visible so you can see all those details but on the other hand if we zoom out we have a nice very clear large-scale displacement that will work in our 3d scene so right now we can actually start exporting that one thing we might want you might want to do and that's personal preference but what I like to do is actually make the entire image perfectly square which like if you go up here you can see that it has a size of 5,700 and something versus 5700 and it's something slightly different so that's probably fine but many software are many different software like to have perfectly squarish textures so just go to image scale image there it is that was looking for scale image and just change the width to something like I don't know I like use 4096 it's a power of 2 it's very convenient we move that little link here and and 4096 that we'll just put it in a sort of standardized size that's likely to be accepted by any software like so now we can export this as a texture so creating your folder I like to I just call this 4k PMG and just export this as like tiles displacement dot PNG I'm going to decrease the compression level to make saving faster and well beyond it I'm also going to export my color map so just hide those layers and export asked now this time we are obviously going to call that color okay two maps are done two maps are left to go so first of all we name all of your your layers to keep track of what you're doing so this would be displacement fine this would be displacement wrong because that's the very fine detail and this is just the raw large scale displacement okay so now let's move on to the roughness now the roughness is usually quite simple for this texture I'm just going to make a copy of our fine displacement I'm just going to call that roughness and I'll make some adjustments to it using the color curves now if you're doing this you need to think about the roughness of the material that you're trying to capture so in my case these tiles they are somewhat stammered glossy but not really glossy so I'm going to choose a roughness value that's somewhere in the middle right now the seams in between they're going to be extremely roughly a extremely rough so I'm going to choose a very high roughness value for them so just go to your calloused and select curves and first of all I'm just going to pull that sat down and this side up so it's inverted now this already looks quite good I want the the seems to be a bit more graph so I'll just adjust it like that yeah but I also want the tiles to be a bit less graph so maybe like so you can experiment with that value again yeah but I think that's good I'm going to keep this and very quickly we have finished with one more map export s tiles roughness okay now onto the final map for that I'm going to move down the roughness all the way to the bottom so that displacement raw and displacement fine right on top of each other because now we need to create the normal map so the normal map is basically generated out of the displacement map but one thing that I like to do in here is just it slightly decrease the opacity for our raw displacement because then we get a bit more detail which is good for a normal map because many people like to use a displacement and a normal map together so that they have the large-scale displacement that would come from the displacement map and then they add a normal map for the very fine displacement so that they can save on geometry and they don't need to make as many subdivisions to accommodate for all of the information in the displacement map so just decrease your displacement map a little bit not too much you don't want to overdo it so I just had this at 70 and maybe I'll just set this to like 55 it seems good 56 and then I'm just going to merge that down that's important because in order for the normal map transformation to work we need to have this in one layer so displacement then make sure that it's selected and go to filters map and now since you've installed this normal map add-on in the beginning you should now see the option normal map click on it it's going to give you this window and this window contains a button that says 3d preview which is going to give you another window so it should look something like this if you look really closely then you can already see that there's something going on on this plane oh maybe maybe it will be like a sphere for you I don't know what's the default setting on this one I like to use the the quad that's just the plane so now you can um adjust your nominal map first of all so that we can actually see what we're working with I like to change the diffuse map to our color map down here so that we can actually see the texture and I like I like to enable specular lighting because that that will give us this really bright dot that we can use to to check the innominate now in this window here that's our actual settings window for the normal map now by default it's set to 4 sample which works fine it gives you a normal map but what I like to do is change it to private 5 by 5 because the normal map that's generated from that it's usually a bit stronger as you can see that I'll just move in and if you zoom in all the way you can see that we get a lot of detail you can see all those little bumps in there but you can also clearly see that this seems between between the tiles I represented very well if you think that this is too strong adjust the scale here so maybe I'm just tune that down to something like 0.85 maybe if you've done that just wait for a second it will update like this and if you think that this looks good just click OK and it will create your normal map so there it is the last map to save export as tiles normal like so and now if we go to our folder to our texture folder you can see that we now have four material maps for our title texture we have the seamless color we have these the displacement we have the normal and we have the roughness map and there we have it this is what our material looks like when we went out I hope this was interesting to you I hope you learned something if you don't feel like creating every single texture yourself you can visit my website CC 0 textures calm which is a continuously growing library of completely free PBR textures that you can use for all of your projects you can also support this project on patreon or follow CC 0 textures on Twitter to get a new texture in your feed every day until next time see ya

Channel: StruffelProductions

Views: 42,904

Keywords: Blender, Demo, Speedart, Cycles, b3d, CGI, Modeling, rendering, 3D, vfx, tutorial, textures, free, help, diy, cc0textures, cc0, download, materials

Id: XanTjY2JKKg

Length: 39min 25sec (2365 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/hi_there_dear_john]

Good tutuorial, I didn't actually know about the decompose hsv feature, that could be quite useful in some cases. One thing I would add, which is something I figured out only recently is the highpass filter addon for GIMP. It's extremely effective at removing highlights from images and averaging out the brightness in the texture and even enabled me to shoot even rather specular surfaces (like my leather texture) with flash enabled, resulting in sharper images and one less thing to worry about. Another thing I experimented with is using multiple algorithms in the normalmap plugin and then overlay them, which gives you very small scale and larger scale detail. (I haven't tested whether this really improves it significantly.)

[u/Baldric]

Good tutorial! Mostly Gimp which is not a problem of course but maybe you should mention this somewhere (youtube description maybe).
Windows taskbar is on autohide for me but sometimes I have to move the mouse to hide it, I moved it multiple times during your video because mine looks almost the same :D